Mindfulness courses to improve student resilience

Colleagues are invited to attend this session of the ‘New Approaches to Teaching for Experienced Staff at Kent’ series taking place on Tuesday 27 February 2018, 12.55-14.00 in the UELT Seminar Room, Canterbury.

Presented by Dr Elisabeth Curling, School of Biosciences.

As an academic member of the School of Biosciences, I have seen the incidence of acute anxiety within our student population rise year by year. This trend is seen across the HE sector. In a recent 2016 YouGov article (1) one in four students suffer from mental health problems, of which 74% are anxiety related. A research paper from Cambridge published in December 2017 proved in a randomised trial that Mindfulness training in helped students to be more resilient to stress, particularly at exam time (2).

We have so far run 3 X 5 week Mindfulness courses and drop-in sessions (with Lorraine Millard, a qualified Mindfulness teacher) for Bioscience students, and I will outline some of the positive feedback we have received in my presentation. The 5 week course has now been adopted by the School of Arts, and other schools could benefit from introducing Mindfulness to help their anxious students reach their full potential.

Dr Elisabeth Curling is a lecturer in the School of Biosciences with particular interests in immunology, human physiology and student welfare. After completing the 8 week Mindfulness course for staff in 2015, she has been running successful 5 week Mindfulness courses for Bioscience students (from October 2016).